Taking It Where You FInd It

My chiropractor's has a sign in his office rhat says:

Everyone you meet knows something you don't. Learn from them.

It's an interesting idea. I'm not sure everyone knows something that I don't know that I'd care to know, but I think it's worthwhile to give each person a shot to prove me wrong.
It's a worthy goal to challenge your perceptions frequently. Making others feel welcome to bring you information is usually difficult and when our closely held beliefs get undermined, it can be traumatic. But if you don't OODA faster than the competition, you lose. Taking useful information where you find it is a survival skill.

Fasten Your Seatbelt

I was on a flight from Salt Lake City to Dulles on Mother’s Day 2004. It was a routine boarding and take-off. We had reached cruising altitude and were a little more than an hour into the flight. The flight attendants had already done the beverage service and I was sitting there working on the computer.

The “Fasten Seat Belt” light came on as it frequently does, followed immediately by the cockpit public address system. Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve turned on the seat belt light…Wham!

For just a second, the g-forces had us all pinned to our seats. I was already strapped in. I closed the screen on my computer and held the computer on the seatback tray with one hand and held a soda in the other. I released the computer to reach down and check my seatbelt.

Whoosh! Instantaneous shift in direction. We were in Negative G’s. People were bouncing off the overhead storage bins. Items levitated weightlessly in the cabin. My computer was suspended motionless at eye level over the aisle. In what seemed like slow-motion (temporal-distortion), I reached up with my left hand and grabbed it out of the air and placed it on the tray. I discarded the plastic soda cup without prejudice to it’s contents or landing place.

In the back of the airplane, a 200LB beverage cart and a flight attendant were suspended in midair.

Crash! Another updraft. The airplane came back up to catch everything that was floating. The flight attendant landed before the beverage cart and the cart landed, crushing the bones in her leg. Those that had just regained their seats frantically scrambled to get buckled in. The up and down continued for a while as the crew searched for cleaner air but we never got sustained negative G long enough to float anything after that.

We landed a Cleveland or Cincinatti to evacuate the injured and switched planes. We got into Dulles at least two hours late.

As I left the jetway, I heard some bozo haranguing a customer service agent for a refund because he paid for a non-stop and had to make a plane change. Whatever…

When I’m flying, I keep that belt on I recommend you do too.